Big Apple

Police released footage on Tuesday of what may be the luckiest theft in recent history. In the clip, a man brazenly swipes an 86-pound bucket full of gold worth $1.6 million from the back of an unattended armored truck on West 48th Street in the Diamond District on Sept. 29 in broad daylight.

We've written frequently in recent weeks about weakening prices for luxury real estate across the country...now it seems as though the weakness is spreading to lower pricing tiers as well, at least in NYC

"New York City just turned very quickly and more deeply than we expected. We had to join the concession party to close deals." Chief Operating Officer David Santee said during the Q1 earnings call, also adding that with the city accounting for 20% of the firm's revenue "if you can't achieve 3 or 4 percent rate growth here, then it's going to impact your bottom line."

Had central bankers simply taken to heart that well known idiom that cautions "a stitch in time saves nine" early on, they would not now be so frantically stitching such a gaping gash in the world economy. One thing is for certain. All of this quantitative pleasing has done little to lift the spirits of the world’s worker bees.

Republicans should give Mayor Mike every encouragement to enter the race. For though he threatens to spend a billion dollars of his own money to buy the presidency, his name on the ballot as a third-party candidate could send the Democratic nominee straight down to Davy Jones’s locker. With Bloomberg siphoning off millions of liberal votes, Democrats would not only lose red states they customarily write off, winning solid blue states would require a far steeper climb.

Update: just minutes after the WPIX report, the WNBC chief investigative reporter Jonathan Dienst said that there is no new specific threat to New York City.

A “credible threat” has been lodged against New York City, days ahead of Christmas and during an especially busy time of the year when tourists flock to the Big Apple, law enforcement sources told PIX11 News Tuesday.

Since the beginning of this year the markets have primarily treaded water. The primary support for the bulls has been continued acknowledgement by the Fed on an inability to remove accommodative policy by raising interest rates. (Which should make you question what happens the first time they do.) The bears have been feasting on weak economic data and deteriorating fundamentals.

First, NYC's cops turned their back on Bill de Blasio, best known for first rushing to side with New York's "oppressed" minorities "threatened" by the local police, and then, when two weeks later 2 NYPD cops were executed in cold blood and in broad daylight in what some hinted was an unintended consequence of the mayor's bashing of the police, scrambling to undo his previous populism and to show his affection for New York's cops. Now, those tasked to protect and to serve the Big Apple, appear to have decided to turn their back on their job entirely, and in what is shaping up to be a long vendetta with the mayor, have succumbed to what the NY Post calls "a virtual work stoppage." This implicit strike by the NYPD is manifesting as follows: "traffic tickets and summonses for minor offenses have dropped off by a staggering 94 percent following the execution of two cops — as officers feel betrayed by the mayor and fear for their safety."

"They are building stuff that nobody really wants or needs," sums up yet another mega ghost city project under development in China. As NBC News reports, China's $50-billion knock-off of the Big Apple - near the port city of Tianjin, some 120 miles from Beijing - complete with its own Rockefeller Center and Twin Towers has been billed as the world's largest financial center in the making. But this Manhattan still has a long way to go...

New York "has the second largest millionaire and largest billionaire population of any global city," according to analysis by Spear's magazine, but as LA Times reports, walk down the streets of The Big Apple and 1 in every 25 New Yorkers you bump into is a millionaire. But if you really want to rub shoulders with the rich... almost 1 in 3 Monaco residents are millionaires) and likely billionaires too...

China's own Big Apple may be rotting from the core. A new central business district modeled after New York City is going up in Tianjin but the project is in jeopardy. While the growth of China's ghost cities of entirely derelict and unlived-in residential real estate have become anathema; the story of the nation's 'if we build it they will come' commercial real estate bubble has been less exposed but is no less incredible. As Bloomberg reports, China’s project to build a replica Manhattan is taking shape against a backdrop of vacant office towers and unfinished hotels, underscoring the risks to a slowing economy from the nation’s unprecedented investment boom. Stunningly, the development has failed to attract tenants since the first building was finished in 2010 leaving one commercial real estate investor to proclaim, "Investing here won’t be better than throwing money into the water... There will be no way out - it will be very difficult to find the next buyer."

Because we’ve reached a point in time at which $1 trillion no longer sounds like a lot of money, we thought we’d go through the exercise of assessing just what the Fed could have done with this money besides give it to Wall Street.